Reading on a Rainy Day

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Showing posts from August, 2014

The Sunday Salon: Fog in the mountains

Good morning from the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina! The family and I just arrived at a cabin we rented here, late afternoon yesterday. So far, it's everything we hoped for. We played a lot of pool and ping-pong, trekked along the property and discovered a cute little treehouse, spent hours gazing at the mountains, roasted marshmallows, and had a campfire dinner as well. This morning, we woke up to a thick blanket of fog covering the mountains, and that's what I'm staring at when I'm not typing up this post. This kind of vacation is so much better than visiting places where you are on your feet most days! (Photos from my cellphone. I'll share better photos after we get back home and copy the photos from the camera.) We don't have any major plans for this vacation other than having some fun time indoors and checking out a couple of state parks in the vicinity. I will be unplugged as well (except for typing this post), and may do some reading a

One Plus One by Jojo Moyes

She couldn't tell him that things would change before he knew it, because when you were a teenager your life really only stretches in your imagination about two weeks ahead, and they both knew that it wasn't going to get better by then. Or, probably, any time soon after that. Jojo Moyes is one of those authors I would never have read or tried to read. When I first attempted Me Before You , I closed it after the first chapter, because it smacked of a fluff novel with a rich good looking guy with a vapid girlfriend and who knows which predictable direction this novel would take. Months later, I found myself without an audiobook to listen to, and Me Before You was what I chose. I very rarely go back to a book I abandoned. But, Me Before You worked. It more than worked. It rocked. One Plus One fared similarly. I wouldn't go as far as to say that it was as good as Me Before You . One Plus One was more predictable. But it was also funny, witty, and filled with misfi

The Sunday Salon: How will we fare in a dystopian world?

Yesterday morning, I finished reading Blindness by José Saramago and since then, I've been wondering what it would be like if an apocalyptic event truly happened. Maybe it's a plague as it is in Blindness , or an uprising that collapses the capital ( The Hunger Games ), or an invasion by extra-terrestrial beings ( Mars Attacks! ), or a pending asteroid strike ( The Last Policeman ), or maybe it's the weather finally punishing us for our don't-care attitude around it, or a Third World War begins and never ends. Whichever it is, which of these dystopian worlds we are too familiar with, will get it right? Picture credit Some of these dystopian books, like The Hunger Games , are pure fun. Others are horrific to read; fun isn't a word used in the same line as the book. That's what reading Blindness was like. Some - The Walking Dead - toe the thin line between the two. There is enough seriousness in this show that we are horrified by a lot of what we s

When was the last time I read a book without distractions? Umm...

Yesterday at work, I was trying to multi-task. Or rather, not really multi-task, but use the time between writing my code and waiting for it to run, to browse through my phone. I usually use these small intervals at work to check Facebook. My weakness is my local pet shelter because they post such cute cuddly photos of the pets they have, but that is neither here nor there. I had once tried to read a book during such a break, but I struggled with putting the book down and read too hurriedly. However, I had recently uninstalled the Facebook app from my phone, seeing as how it is such a useless distraction. So then, I started browsing through my feeds in Feedly, which is usually my second stop after Facebook, and that was when I saw this article at Salon by Michael Harris in which he journaled his struggle with reading War and Peace . That's not a journey I can relate to since I have never felt the urge to read this humongous title, but I have tried to read big books in the past

The Sunday Salon: A bookstore just like A. J. Fikry's

Good morning, Saloners! It's a beautiful morning here, with the sun nowhere in sight. I'm currently perched on my deck, writing this post, and thinking that rain would be a good idea today. We've been getting a lot of it lately, and the last 2-3 days have been sunny and almost perfect for heading out and doing some outdoors thing, if only it didn't feel as if the sun was right on your shoulders. It is kind of scary how wet and not warm enough the last two summers have been. During the year I moved to Lynchburg, it was very insanely hot and humid here. It felt even worse than it actually was because I had spent the previous two summers in Blacksburg, which is up in the mountains and had a mostly cool and wet climate through the summer. As you probably know, cool and wet is the way I like my days to be. (There's a reason my blog has 'Rainy' in its title.) But I can't deny that it feels as if we had some unseasonable weather this whole season. I've

Sisters by Raina Telgemeier

Ever since I read Raina Telgemeier's Drama , I was enamored by her illustrations. I loved Drama . I read Smile next and loved that too. Then I read her Baby Sitter's Club graphic novels (even though I hadn't read the original books nor wanted to) and I loved those too. Then I sat waiting for her Sisters to come. I had the book penciled in my calendar against its release date and I just had to wait patiently, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the book to to get released. But when I saw it listed on NetGalley, I had to request it right away. Sisters is being advertised as a sequel to Smile , but you don't have to read Smile to be able to follow Sisters . Since I had already read Smile , Sisters was like a return to a family I enjoyed reading about so much. When Raina was fourteen and her sister, Amara, nine, they go on a road trip along with their six year old brother, Will, and their mother, from California to Colorado. Their road trip turns out to be

City of Thieves by David Benioff

But I couldn't feel my fingertips even though I wore thick wool mittens and had shoved my hands into the pockets of my overcoat. Nor could I feel the tip of my nose. What a good joke that would be - I spent most of my adolescence wishing for a smaller nose; a few more hours in the woods and I wouldn't have a nose. Somewhere in my reading journey, I seemed to have picked up a stereotype that screenwriters are poor novelists. I think it started with reading a book written by a screenwriter and finding it very immature. That was probably followed by a few other such books until this stereotype stuck in my head. One example that comes to mind is Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. That was one of the most exciting books I read in 2011 but it was also poorly written and clichéd. So when I came across David Benioff's City of Thieves , I was very hesitant to read it. I've been hearing about this book for years, ever since I started blogging. In those days, I wasn't aw

The Sunday Salon: Back from New Orleans

Another MIA week around here but hopefully the last one for a while, since I have a couple of posts written and scheduled to go. For whatever reason, I have been in a writing mood yesterday, not that I am complaining. So I got a couple of reviews done and ready to go. Last week, I was in New Orleans up until hump day for a trade show as an exhibitor. Being on your feet for three days in a row can be killing. I wore nice comfortable running shoes all three days, but there were women who wore heels throughout - the pointy variety. Now, I like how heels look on a woman's feet - so graceful and elegant. But you won't find me in a pointy pair, even if my life is on the line. So it baffles me completely when I see someone wearing a pair of heels when they have to be either standing or walking for a good portion of a day, never mind three days. When I wasn't at the event, I was at a couple of customer events. It wasn't until the evening before I was returning that some o

The Sunday Salon: Mountain Cabin-a-hunting

Phew, busy week! And not even for my usual reason (work). I've spent a chunk of the week hunting for a nice mountain cabin at which to spend the Labor day weekend. I'm not sure where the idea came from exactly, since we had never done this before. I believe the husband dropped a thought and I clung to it like it was a life jacket. After a lot of hunting, we found one in North Carolina that we liked and booked it. Some things I noticed while I was cabin-a-hunting: There are so many people out there with vacation homes in the mountains. If you are one of them, good for you! I may have told the husband that some day I want my own cabin. He may have told me that the option is beyond our means. Some of those cabins are deliciously amazing retreats. I probably spent more time than I should drooling over some of those houses. Occasionally, I removed the price filter from the search, just to see what's the best house I can get if I didn't have a budget to stick to. I